The Open Boat and Other Tales Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Peter Buitenhuis

Critical Essay by Peter Buitenhuis

SOURCE: Buitenhuis, Peter. “The Essentials of Life: ‘The Open Boat’ as Existential Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 5, no. 3 (autumn 1959): 243-50.

In the following essay, Buitenhuis discusses “The Open Boat” as existentialist fiction, contending that “no story of Crane more profoundly embodies within its structure, style, and symbolism the meaning of experience.”

Stephen Crane's “The Open Boat” is not a naturalistic story, although it has often been labelled as such.¹ The protagonist, in the interpretation of his own experience in the boat, transcends the limits of naturalistic philosophy and makes the kind of affirmation that has become familiar to us from the work of Albert Camus and other existentialist writers. No story of Crane more profoundly embodies within its structure, style, and symbolism the meaning of experience. Several critics have examined these techniques, but they have done so without fully relating them to the story's meaning.² It is the...
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